How to Migrate Audiences from UA to Google Analytics 4

The time has come to say a final goodbye to Universal Analytics. If you haven't yet, you'll need to migrate everything over to Google Analytics 4, and that includes your valuable audiences. This article will guide you through the process of recreating your Universal Analytics (UA) audiences in GA4, ensuring your remarketing and personalization campaigns don't miss a beat.

Why You Can't Just "Migrate" UA Audiences to GA4

First, let's clear up a common misconception. There is no one-click "migrate" button to move your audiences from UA to GA4. You must recreate them from scratch. This isn’t a bug or an oversight, it’s because the two platforms measure user behavior in fundamentally different ways.

• Universal Analytics (UA) used a session-based model. It built audiences around metrics like pages per session, session duration, and goal completions. It thought in terms of visits.
• Google Analytics 4 uses an event-based model. Every user action is an event - a page_view, a scroll, a video play (video_start), an add_to_cart, or a purchase. It thinks in terms of users and their specific actions throughout their entire journey.

This difference may seem small, but it's massive. The conditions you used to define an audience in UA often don't have a direct equivalent in GA4. The good news is that GA4’s event-based system is far more flexible and powerful, allowing you to create more specific and meaningful audiences once you get the hang of it.

Step 1: Audit Your Existing UA Audiences

Before you rush to rebuild every audience, take this as an opportunity to do some spring cleaning. Not every audience you created years ago is still relevant or effective. A quick audit will save you time and result in a cleaner, more organized GA4 account.

Navigate to your Universal Analytics account:

1. Go to Admin (the gear icon in the bottom-left).
2. In the Property column, click on Audience Definitions > Audiences.

Here you’ll see a list of every audience you’ve created. For each one, ask yourself:

• What is its purpose? (e.g., "Remarketing for abandoned carts," "Exclusion list for recent purchasers").
• Is it actively being used? Check if it's connected to a Google Ads campaign or a personalization tool.
• How is it defined? Note the specific conditions and metrics used to build it.

Create a simple spreadsheet to track this. It will become your blueprint for remaking audiences in GA4. Your columns could look like this:

• UA Audience Name: e.g., Abandoned Cart Users
• Purpose: Google Ads remarketing campaign to bring users back.
• UA Definition: Users who visited the /cart page but did not visit the /thank-you page.
• Recreate in GA4?: Yes
• New GA4 Name: [E-COM] Cart Abandoners (30 Days)
• Anticipated GA4 Definition: Users who triggered add_to_cart event and did not trigger purchase event.

This exercise ensures you only migrate audiences that are genuinely valuable to your business, helping you start fresh in GA4 with a focused strategy.

Step 2: How to Recreate Common Audiences in GA4

With your audience audit complete, it's time to get your hands dirty and start building in GA4. First, let’s get to the audience builder:

1. In GA4, go to Admin.
2. In the Property column, under Data display, click on Audiences.
3. Click the blue New audience button.
4. You'll have an option to use suggested audiences or create a custom one. We'll be focusing on the Create a custom audience option, as this is where you'll rebuild your UA logic.

Now, let's walk through recreating some of the most common audience types from UA.

Example 1: Users Who Visited a Specific Page

This is one of the simplest and most common audiences, perfect for remarketing to users who showed interest in a specific product, service, or pricing page.

• UA Logic: Users who viewed the /pricing page.
• GA4 Equivalent: Users who triggered a page_view event where the page location contains "/pricing".

Steps to Recreate in GA4:

1. In the custom audience builder, name your audience (e.g., Visited Pricing Page).
2. Under "Include users when," click Add new condition.
3. In the search box, find and select the Event: page_view.
4. Click Add parameter. From the dropdown, select page_location.
5. Set the condition to contains and then type /pricing in the value box.
6. Click Apply, set your Membership duration (e.g., 30 days), and click Save.

Example 2: Engaged Users

In UA, "engaged users" was often defined by session-based metrics. In GA4, we now have a much better built-in measure of engagement: the session_start event paired with parameters like engaged sessions.

• UA Logic: Users with Session Duration > 120 seconds OR Pages/Session > 3.
• GA4 Equivalent: Users who were part of an engaged session AND who viewed more than 3 pages.

Steps to Recreate in GA4:

1. Name your audience (e.g., Highly Engaged Users).
2. Add a condition for the Event: session_start.
3. Click Add parameter, find and select Engaged session (this may show up as _is_engaged_session).
4. Set the value to "(Standard) True" or 1. GA4 defines an engaged session as lasting longer than 10 seconds, having a conversion event, or having at least 2 pageviews.
5. Add a new condition group:
6. Click Apply, set the membership duration, and save.

Example 3: Goal Completers / Converters

GA4's event-based model really shines here. Instead of dealing with UA's sometimes-clunky Goal setup, you now target users who triggered a specific conversion event.

• UA Logic: Users who completed the "newsletter signup" Destination Goal.
• GA4 Equivalent: Users who triggered the newsletter_signup conversion event.

Steps to Recreate in GA4:

1. Name your audience (e.g., Newsletter Subscribers).
2. Add a condition and search for your conversion event by name, e.g., newsletter_signup.
3. Because this event only fires on a successful signup, no other parameters are needed.
4. Click Apply, set a long membership duration (e.g., 540 days), and save.

Example 4: E-commerce Cart Abandoners

Recreating a cart abandoner audience in UA often required building a complex sequence. GA4's audience builder makes this significantly more intuitive.

• UA Logic: Users with sessions containing an Add to Cart action but not a Transaction.
• GA4 Equivalent: Users in a sequence who triggered add_to_cart and later DID NOT trigger purchase.

Steps to Recreate in GA4:

1. Name your audience (e.g., Abandoned Cart - 14 Days).
2. Instead of "Add new condition," click Add sequence.
3. In Step 1, add a condition for the event add_to_cart.
4. Click Add step to the right, a new step box appears.
5. In Step 2, open its menu and choose to temporarily include users who complete both steps.
6. In Step 2, add the event purchase.
7. Change the setting to Exclude group when.
8. Ensure the sequence is set to "is indirectly followed by" and "within the same session."
9. Click Apply, set the membership duration, and save.

Step 3: Connect Your Audiences to Other Platforms

Building your audience is only half the battle. To use them for remarketing, you must connect GA4 to Google Ads and other services. Remember to make sure these connections have already been set up so GA4 can share audience data with your platforms.

Enable Google Signals

For more robust cross-device remarketing, make sure Google Signals is activated. Navigate to Admin > Data Settings > Data Collection and enable it.

Link to Google Ads

If you haven't already, link your GA4 property to your Google Ads account to sync your new audiences for your campaigns. Go to Admin > Product Links > Google Ads and follow the linking process.

Once linked, any audience you create in GA4 will automatically become available for targeting in your Google Ads account, usually within 24-48 hours.

Final Thoughts

Recreating your UA audiences in GA4 is less of a direct migration and more of a strategic rebuild. By taking the time to audit your old audiences and thoughtfully reproduce them using GA4's event-based logic, you can build more precise and effective segments for your marketing efforts. This transition is not just a required task, it's a valuable chance to refine your targeting and analytics strategy for a new era of data measurement.

Switching platforms and rebuilding reports can be frustrating, especially when you're trying to prove campaign performance across different tools. At Graphed, we simplify this entirely. Instead of wrestling with conflicting data from GA4, Google Ads, and your CRM, you can connect them all in one place and ask plain English questions like, "Show me a dashboard of ad spend vs. confirmed sales for my last campaign." We instantly build a live, shareable dashboard, letting you spend more time on strategy and less time buried in manual reporting.